The Age of Consent by George Monbiot

Having made a hugely significant contribution to the increasingly irrefutable, if alarming, diagnosis of the ills of early 21st century consumerist culture and its free-market myths, George Monbiot sets out now with this book to offer something more constructive, a set of proposals – political, democratic, economic, environmental – that might affect the cultural change that many in the West (not to mention those on the outside of the West looking in) now want but scarcely know how to make happen.

‘The Age of Consent’ is provocative, brave, even utopian. But, with most of the 20th century’s Big Ideas dead in the gutter, it’s time for a book that can be a touchstone for real debate about the political and economic presumptions and prejudices on which our society has rested since World War II.

George Monbiot, 39, the son of a former President of the Conservative Party, has been persona non grata in seven countries, had a life sentence in absentia given to him by an Indonesian court, has been shot at, beaten up by military police, shipwrecked and stung into a coma during seven years of investigative journeys across Africa, Asia and the Americas. He was even pronounced clinically dead of cerebral malaria in Kenya, only to rise again, return to Britains comparative safety, and turn himself into the countrys most articulate, most enterprising and most effective non-conformist political commentator.